~ A Life in Wellies

Monthly Archives: March 2013

Whilst I was away in Cornwall I saw a tweet about a garden not too far from where I live and the story that it was to be dug up and dismantled. Once, flooded fields and overgrown weeds surrounded Ochran Mill just outside Abergavenny but over ten years ago Elaine and David Rolfe moved in and transformed the land. Nature was tamed, the grass was cut to define new borders and the planting began. It didn’t take the couple long before they had created a verdant, lush space packed with trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials. The garden featured on Gardener’s World and they opened every year for the NGS.

Then David became very sick and he discovered he was terminally ill. Devastating news for the family was compounded by the need to move from the home and garden they loved. But if all that wasn’t enough the land agents who own the property said the garden would have to be dismantled and returned to pasture as it would be off-putting to new tenants faced with maintaining it. If this didn’t happen then the private Llanover Estate initially said they would charge (although this is no longer the case) the Rolfes for the cost of making it more tenant friendly.

My raised beds which will no doubt be replaced with grass when we sell.

I wasn’t the only person the day the news broke to be incensed by the story. The gross insensitivity on the part of the landowners seemed quite incredible and how heartbreaking to have to take apart something you have so lovingly put together when you are going through such a dreadful time anyway. The story does also show the two sides of a supposed nation of gardeners. On the one hand you have a couple with more than just green fingers whose love for plants is obviously huge. Then you have those who see gardens as hard work, a hindrance and a chore.

I’ve lived in my fair share of rented places and if people are passing through it does make sense as a landlord to have gardens that don’t require a lot of maintenance. Our first home together was on an army base, the garden came with a scruffy, moss-ridden lawn and four of the scrawniest looking roses you’ll ever come across and that was it. Outdoor spaces were maintained under the threat of penalties when you ‘marched out’. That really was the term they gave to moving house (they didn’t make you literally march out the house though, fortunately). Accommodation on private estates in rural areas tend to be mid to long-term lets though. These aren’t commuter areas or military bases with people moving on after six months, it isn’t unusual for tenants to stay in estate properties for ten, fifteen or more years.

In 2010 the UK garden retail market was worth £4.6 billion and we think of ourselves as a nation of gardeners but what criteria make you a gardener? Does buying a ready-made hanging basket and watering it occasionally throughout the summer make you a gardener? If your garden only consists of lawn, does mowing it every week constitute gardening? What about filling your borders with bedding plants that you buy? You might plant them but they may need no more attention once in the ground, does that make you a gardener?

The idea that a beautiful garden is an encumbrance rather than an asset perhaps says more about the general attitude to gardening than statistics of how much is spent on gardening products. My own garden is smaller than the average, with no lawn because I wanted it to be full of plants. It isn’t high maintenance. In fact, without a lawn it’s actually pretty undemanding but I know when we come to sell that’s not what potential buyers will think. I’m already prepared for the conversation where I explain how easy it will be to take out the raised beds and lay some turf, just so they can replace low maintenance plants with a high maintenance lawn.

My front garden, once just scruffy grass.

Walk around most garden centres and it’s easy to see where the £4.6 billion is spent and a lot of it doesn’t seem to be on items with any real relevance to gardening. Outdoor living is the new gardening whether it’s admiring your meerkats or the bejewelled, oversized butterflies on stems plonked around the garden. A few plants that might attract some actual butterflies might be a better choice. I think, rather like my recent post on whether the grow your own revolution had died, there is a hard-core group of dedicated gardeners, people with a real passion for plants and wildlife and then there is a much more significant group on the peripheries. The success of the Alan Titchmarsh Love Your Garden programme on ITV has seemed to prove this point. Much more about make-overs than gardening, the instant effect seems to win out when faced with the actual growing of plants shown on Gardener’s World.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me then that the garden at Ochran Mill is to be uprooted. Many of the plants are going to good homes and Bristol Zoo is taking some of the more exotic and rare specimens but it’s sad that the beauty of the gardens and the hard work that went into them wasn’t appreciated.

The one downside to growing all the plants I need for the book I’m writing is not being able to go away for any reasonable length of time. Dreams of a week away will have to be put on hold this year. I have been known in the past to take seedlings and young plants on holiday with me rather than leave them to fend for themselves but the volumes I’m growing this year would mean hiring a van just for the plants. A mobile greenhouse, now there’s a thought.

Last week we did manage to squeeze in a few days in Cornwall and whilst winter still had its grip on most of the country we escaped to the one place untouched by snow and frost. I could go on and on about why Cornwall is such an amazing place. Whether it’s the quality of the light, the stunning beaches or the rugged coastline they are all great reasons to spend some time there but it’s the milder climate and longer growing season that tempts me to live there permanently. Despite the ear-aching cold wind I was surprised at just how many plants were flowering. At home my garden was slowing clawing its way into spring. In the narrow, sheltered streets of Padstow it was hard to tell what season it was going by the plants in flower. There was lavender and scented narcissi, ceanothus and primroses. So close to the warming influence of the water, frost and snow are rare occurrences in the county, and in the tiny villages which hug the cliffs running down to the sea the extra shelter provides an enviable micro-climate. The red valerian in one garden looked like it hadn’t stopped flowering since last year.

Cornish fields of daffodils

There is one flower, perhaps more than any other that is connected to Cornwall and that is the daffodil. For centuries farmers have grown them as a crop both for cut flowers and bulbs, the milder climate allowing them to pick flowers from October right through to the end of March. I’ve always wanted to see daffodils grown on such a scale but have never visited Cornwall at this time of year before. Then coming back from a visit to Falmouth we saw fields of gold in front of us. At first I instinctively thought it was rapeseed until I realised what it actually was. I was pointing excitedly and saying ‘We’ve got to stop’. I realise that sounds a bit odd, it was only a field of daffodils after all. Finding a place to stop so I could get some photos I opened the car door to be completely surprised by the smell. Although on the side of the road furthest from the field the scent of so many daffodils drifted across to me. After all those years of thinking about how the scene would look I’d never given any thought to the fact that it would smell so amazing and I wasn’t even that close. I love it when that happens. You come across or experience something you’ve thought about for a long time and not only does it meet your expectations it exceeds them.

It was good to get a few days rest, walk on the beach and breathe in the sea air but the general aim of going away was to come back feeling re-energised and raring to go. Unfortunately the bug I picked up on the last day had other ideas. I’m blaming a dodgy mussel. I’ll spare you the details but it may be a long time before I can face seafood again.

So one minute it feels like spring the next minute we’re plunged back into winter. Of course, this is perfectly natural at this time of year as the seasons change. It’s possible to have snow and hail showers even in April but I am so desperate now for some warmth and some sunshine and I know I’m not alone. It doesn’t help that this time last year we were basking in sunshine and temperatures into the seventies. But then again we all know how last year’s weather turned out.

After a stormy night with gusts of wind that disturbed my sleep I thought I should check the plot just to make sure a couple of cloche-type constructions I have up there were still in place. They had collapsed but the plants underneath were fine. Some remedial repair work was needed though. Our timing couldn’t have been worse as the blue sky turned dark and grey and a squally snow shower blew across the allotments. There we were, Wellyman and I, trying to fold a sheet of polythene which turned into a sail in the strong winds as tiny snow flakes whipped at our faces. There are times when I wonder why I grow my own and this was one of those moments.

This is the time of year when there’s much debate as to when to sow. Most of us are champing at the bit to get our hands on some compost once Christmas is over. In January though, light levels are low and some of the coldest weather of the winter is still ahead of us so it is wise to be restrained. There does come a point however, when, regardless of what the weather is doing outside, you just have to go for it. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. For me I would much rather take a bit of a risk and sow a little early perhaps and if the worst comes to the worst I can resow. If I’m fortunate and the weather is good then I’ve got a bit of a head start.

Spinach seedlings

This year has been a frustratingly slow start with many seeds struggling to germinate in the greenhouse but a bit of sunshine is all it takes now for the greenhouse to be lovely and warm inside. So in the last few weeks seeds have germinated and there are now heartening signs of growth. Spinach is growing well, as are my red leaved dandelions and my pot of pea shoots. Signs that my first salad pickings aren’t too far off.

Sweet peas germinated in the warmth of my kitchen have been moved to the colder greenhouse to encourage strong growth. Tempting as it is to try to get plants to grow more quickly, forcing them on in the artificially warm conditions of my home will only produce soft plants which will struggle when introduced to the reality of outdoors life.

Back in January before we had our first cold spell I noticed Verbena bonariensis seedlings appearing in my gravel path. It’s a plant I love but I tend to buy in good-sized plants in mid-spring as these have had a head start on the self seeded plants that appear in my garden. The mild weather up until that point must have encouraged these plants to appear; I wouldn’t normally expect to see them until April. I gently pulled them from the gravel and potted them up and put them in the greenhouse. There was a point when it looked like they were all dying but in the last few days strong healthy buds have started to appear. Sheltering in the greenhouse today with snowflakes hitting the glass it’s hard to believe that these little plants will be taller than me by the summer and swaying in a gentle, warm breeze. Tucked underneath on one of the shelves of my greenhouse staging are pots with dahlia tubers in them. I potted them up last week into slightly damp compost. Planting up dahlias early, as long as you can keep them somewhere frost-free until mid May, means a much longer flowering season.

For me this need to persevere and keep going is one of the reasons why I love gardening and growing so much. In many aspects of life I have a tendency to pessimism, or realism as I prefer to call it but growing sort of forces me to get on with things. It would be easy enough for me to look out the window and become quite downhearted by the weather at the moment and think I’ll just stay indoors where it’s warm and cosy. I know though that if I don’t sow and don’t prepare that I’ll curse myself in several weeks time when it is more like spring. It’s the window sills full of little pots of newly pricked out seedlings and signs of growth that tell me to plough on regardless. I’d love to hear about the seeds you’ve sown so far.

Over the last ten years or so a phenomenon has taken the garden world by storm. Nobody could have predicted back in the nineties that growing your own fruit and vegetables would be so big. With so many magazines and books devoted to the subject it’s hard to remember what gardening was like before. Of course, there were people growing their own before it became the trendy thing to do, then, for a whole host of reasons, a new generation was inspired to pick up their trowels and start growing. The problem with anything that becomes trendy though is that it can fall out of fashion just as quickly.

I’ve been wondering about the whole grow your own thing for a while now and whether the bubble has burst. I loved gardening before it became fashionable. I was an incredibly uncool teenager who watched Gardener’s World on a Friday night. As growing veg surged in popularity I was moving around the country from rented house to rented house with no garden to call my own, and with the urge to grow and put down roots of the plant kind getting stronger by the day. When we finally settled in one place it was no surprise to us that there was a waiting list for allotments in our village. Why wouldn’t there be, everyone wanted an allotment. We were lucky, it didn’t take long for us to get a plot but my experience there suggests that the enthusiasm for growing your own food has waned.

The last few weekends when we’ve had dry and even sunny weather, Wellyman and I have been the only people at the allotments. This is the perfect chance to get the allotment ship-shape before growing gets under way. Most tenants are retired and tend to go to the allotment on weekdays. The newest plotholder is a lovely man in his seventies and these guys really do look after their allotments but they were all gardening and growing food long before the recent resurgence. What we don’t seem to have any of are families and those younger people who were meant to have been excited by the idea of growing heirloom carrots and tending a compost heap. They have been there. My neighbour loved River Cottage and the idea of providing fresh and tasty food for her family but, in the end, other commitments were more pressing and she has given up her plot.

I’m lucky, because I work from home I can generally find an hour or so during the day to pop up to the allotment. If it has been wet for days and days and then there’s a dry spell I have the advantage of being able to go and get jobs done. But it has got me thinking, is it possible to manage an allotment when you work full-time and have other responsibilities or are allotments mainly the preserve of the retired? Has the generation swept up by the ideas of their own bit of the ‘good life’ realised that juggling jobs, families and other demands on their time aren’t compatible with maintaining an allotment.

Alan Titchmarsh wrote recently about the accusation that TV gardeners have made the whole subject appear too easy and have lulled a whole group of people into a false idea of just how much work is actually required. Unsurprisingly he disagrees. He believes it has more to do with people being used to instant gratification and not being able to see things through. This is an opinion shared by many on my allotment site who have seen people come and go. Certainly when it comes to cooking, if you look at the vast numbers of recipe books sold every year and the almost wall to wall food programmes you’d think we’d have a better relationship with what we eat. And yet it seems many watch these programmes whilst eating ready meals. Perhaps growing your own is going this way too. The idea is very lovely but the effort required not so. There is no denying though that modern life has become much more demanding. The idea we would work a three or four-day week and that technology would liberate us has never materialised. Plotholders do have the option of taking on really small plots on our site but even this hasn’t been enough to make them more manageable.

Squash flower

It was decided recently to set up a committee to liaise with the council and to try to improve the management of the allotments. The idea was to work towards establishing an allotment association. Unfortunately it was a struggle to get four people to be on the initial committee. I put my hand up and looked around at the sea of faces, no one wanting to make eye contact, hoping others would volunteer themselves. The idea that there would be enough enthusiasm and drive to become a self-managing site is rapidly diminishing. The dilemma for my village’s allotments is that we can’t attract and then keep younger plotholders and the older tenants generally aren’t interested in trying to inject some vibrancy into the place. They really want the site to stay as it is. My other allotment neighbour is 82 and said to me the other day ‘I’m not that fussed about the plot this year, my knees are giving me grief but it gets me out of the house’.

I don’t know about you but it all makes my heart sink. I’d love it if there were people who wanted to put up a polytunnel and introduce an allotment show but ideas like this are greeted with complaints about people trying to change things. It will certainly be an interesting year for my village allotment. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What does your site do to attract and keep new tenants?

Daffodils for St David’s Day (from last year as none are flowering in my garden yet)

I spent Tuesday in London meeting my publisher. Now that’s not a phrase I ever thought I would utter. I still have to pinch myself when I’m in a meeting with my editor chatting about gardening that this is actually happening. None of it feels like my natural habitat. For a start I always feel like a country bumpkin when I visit London. The noise, the traffic and so many people is such a contrast to where I live that I tend to find it all a tad overwhelming. I love the amazing choice of shops and restaurants, the incredible architecture (the old buildings and not all those glass monstrosities) and excellent museums but I generally feel like a fish out of water.

Then, on top of all that I get to have a glimpse inside the world of publishing and I feel like a whale out of water. I was pretty nervous meeting my editor for the first time. Strangely more so than the day I went to London to pitch my idea for the book. My entrance to the office was pretty ignominious when I couldn’t even grasp how to open the door, someone inside saw me struggling and had to open it for me. Defeated by a security keypad didn’t feel like the best entrance I’d ever made but at least I wasn’t wandering around with my skirt tucked in my knickers. It has happened before.

I suppose for some, publishing doesn’t hold much fascination and I’m sure there are boring bits and frustrating elements just like any other job. But for someone who went to a school where the words ambition and creativity didn’t really exist, it does feel exciting to get the opportunity to see into this world. My careers teacher did nothing to show us the world of opportunities out there. There was a handful of brilliant teachers but, on the whole, you either went to work in a local factory or, if you were able to get to university, you would become a teacher. Now there’s nothing wrong with either of these occupations, it’s just frustrating that the expectations were so restricted. Wellyman read this quote on twitter recently from the philosopher Alain de Botton, ‘Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.’

My natural habitat though is in my jeans and wellies, in the garden or on the allotment. It’s where I feel most comfortable, but the weather recently has meant I haven’t been able to get much done. Nearly three weeks of no rain has allowed the ground to dry out but the bitterly cold wind and freezing temperatures have driven me indoors where it’s warm. I’m aware though that time is moving on and whilst the garden may have had its spring clean the allotment has been in need of some attention.

Topped up paths

Last Friday we spotted a pile of chipped bark left behind by the council after a spot of tree shredding. The paths on the allotment were in need of a bark top-up and so on Saturday morning we were gathering bark chippings and filling green waste sacks and rubble bags. Fortunately we didn’t have to make as many trips as we did the first time round.

Then I spent yesterday weeding, edging paths, trimming back autumn raspberry canes and generally making the plot look tidy again. I have to admit a certain degree of vanity has crept in, with regards to the plot, as it will be featuring in photos this summer and I want it to look good. I’ve also joined the allotment committee so I need to be practising what I preach. I can hardly complain about someone else’s plot if my own is a mess.

Inevitably, at this time of year, my body isn’t used to the sort of exertion needed to keep the plot in shape and so there are very few bits today that don’t ache. Signs of buds breaking on the blueberries, shoots of new raspberry canes and the first flowers appearing on my stocks are so exciting though, they make the pain worthwhile.

Despite the generally mild winter the recent cold spell has made a big difference. I know it’s only the first day of March and St David’s Day but my ‘February Gold’ daffodils haven’t flowered yet. Even after the recent severe winters they still flowered in February. It certainly looks like it is going to be a slow start to the growing season. I’d love to know if plants are late to show in your gardens too or is it just mine?

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